3296

I agree, with regard to Fallout 3 and 4, but I think Skyrim does a better job. The wagons provide an in-game system with limited routes. And mounts can speed any overland travel.

In Fallout, though, they ignore the issue. I hope that approach does not continue into the next Elder Scrolls.

3297

Yeah I also think fast travel is entirely optional in Bethesda games. I’m holding out for FO4 GOTY so I can’t comment on the latest, but in Skyrim you are pretty much gimping yourself by fast travelling. There will be places and random encounters you will miss if you decide to fast travel after you THINK you have discovered most of the locations. And the vistas are beautiful in Skyrim, it is sheer joy to go from town to town on foot.

Less so in Oblivion and FO3, because the random encounters are glitchy and prone to crash the game, and there aren’t enough varieties to the random encounters. Especially in FO3 the subway, you want to actively avoid once you have cleared it, because there is nothing to gain looking at another tunnel again.

3298

How did you manage to skip the first major plot points and re-enter it at a later point?

3299

Fantastic!!

-Todd

3300

I think Morrowind pretty much had the balance between convenient travel and making the world feel large and full down pat except the default movement speed was way too slow. There was fast travel, but it was between fixed points through various travel networks (silt striders, boats, the Propylon Codex, etc) except for the spells that transported you to the nearest “X” (temple, etc) or to one specific memorized spot (mark/recall). But you could also do things like dramatically boost your Acrobatics to be able to jump great distances, or combine a permanent levitate enchantment with a major speed buff to more-or-less fly and not have to worry about terrain or most enemies (except cliff racers - there’s a reason they’re so hated). More immersive and less world-shrinking than casually fast travelling at a whim, but still made getting around perfectly doable, at least as you hit a point on the power curve where you had the cash to make regular use of transit systems or the power to put together enchantments and such.

3301

They don’t totally ignore the issue. You can sprint pretty fast in Fallout 4. Obviously, it takes AP to do so, but you end up going close to Skyrim mount speed when you sprint in F4.

3302

I recall that great Fallout 3 mod where you could acquire a motorcycle – and you couldn’t fast travel until you found it --then after you got it, it behaved like a vehicle and you could use it to fast travel. I think fallout 2 had something similar with a car. But It’s been ages.

But its true – I, for one, played a heavily modded Skyrim with no fast travel and it was a whole better experience. And I am playing a heavily modded F:NV with fast travel and am fine with it (given my intent to get through and move on).

Fast travel is a problem for these games and self discipline with it present is impossible. What we need is motivation to not fast travel (besides the obvious exploration and realism trope) and maybe we won’t. I submit we use my fitbit for walking counters and reward and then maybe no fast travel! Well you guys cant use my fitbit but you can get your own.

3303

You know, I think you’ve hit on something. Instead of discouraging fast travel, why not encourage walking? Something like your fitbit is an awesome idea. Positive reinforcement instead of negative reinforcement! I want you on the design team for Bethesda’s next game!

-Tom

3304

AFAIK you can’t. What I was impressed with was that Bethesada rather than prohibiting the player from trying something, or doing like the did in New Vegas, stick signs up and tell you this way has death claws don’t go there, went to the effort to pretty subtly direct you back to the main quest. It is part of what I really like about the game. There is a lot of attention to detail on many parts.

That said to a significant extent Bethesda elected for a quality of quantity. I’ve now done the trek from Sanctuary to Tempines Bluff, three times once each for every character. I’ve found 4 different encounters/quest by taking slightly different routes. This last one I came across thicket evacuations. Which has a mildly interesting quest. I never saw it the first two times because once I found Tempines Bluff I always fast traveled to and from there. If I never replayed the game I never would have seen the more interesting beginning level quest.

Now, of course, you don’t have to use fast travel. But I am rather goal oriented and I actually do want to find Shaun. I want to finish this quest to get this reward, so I generally bypass places I discover randomly. I figure that eventually, I’ll get a quest to explore the place. Realistically, I alway end these games with a huge list of undone quests. I have a friend that made a point of going to every location in F:NV. I probably will never have that amount of patience. I guess it is that good that there is so much content in FO4, that you can replay Fallout 4 several times and have new experiences each time.

But it feels wrong from an immersion perspective. So I’d actually hope that Bethesda would find a system that made kept travel from being routine, but did nudge/reward us for exploring more.

Edit: what Tom said positive reinforcement.

3305

It did not behave like that. FO1 and 2 did not have fast travel. You clicked on the overland map and then watched an icon crawl over to that location, waiting for any random encounters. The car in FO2 made you travel faster and enabled you to store stuff in its trunk.

3306

Walking is “encouraged” by being able to find something interesting around pretty much every corner as well as having random encounters.
What else should Bethesda do instead of adding useless systems to simulate the whole fast travel proccess more “realistic” (and no I don’t think it would add anything to the game if you introduce vehicles and such, it would just add more questions like why are you the only one in the wasteland to use one)?
I mean you talk about mods but then let’s also mention that those mods who do change fast travel were never popular and all the big mods never touched it and that for a very good reason.
Imo you just seem to ignore that “playing the game” is the “positive reinforcement” for walking instead of fast traveling. What you want to do seems more like forcing the player into a certain play style. You can’t just dismiss that Betheda’s answer to the whole “problem” is to let the player decide how much he walks around or doesn’t. Some people prefer to play very objective oriented and want to get very fast to the meat of the game while others like to take their time. So in the end there is no perfect system but the current one gives at least maximum freedom to the players. If you limit fast travel then it WILL negatively effect the play style of a lot of people. No limitation of fast travel simply doesn’t have this problem because people who don’t like fast travel can just ignore it.

3307

Admittedly I haven’t played FO4, but in FO3 and NV I did find myself thinking that although I preferred the idea of walking travel, it was pretty boring, and that I used fast travel a lot, simply because it cut down on the feeling that the short distances between places of interest destroyed the immersion in the world. Ie, a small town within 5 minutes of supermutant owned areas, overpowered critters wandering around NPC camps that couldn’t hold off a fly. Strange things like a fallen overpass began to feature like a set-piece, which threw the world scale out of whack. Not that the old Fallouts were better balanced, but that the top down map abstracted distance, and urged your mind to imagine a more realized world than they needed to actually build, and let them feature more unique details rather than boring landmarks that you need to show to allow a continuous path. I don’t know the answer, but it might just be a ‘me’ problem than something that bothers the larger gaming community.

3308

Crackdown. Saints row 4. Just Cause 3 (*though I fast travel some, I mostly hoof in that game way more than I do in Fallout 4, relatively speaking). Spiderman 2. The Hulk games. Spiderman Web of Shadows. What do these games all have in common? Why yes it is the simple and amazing joy in playing the game is getting from A to B rocks. It’s just as fun as whatever you do at B.

Games like Fallout 3+ were cut from an entirely different cloth, of course. It’s why nobody thinks about fast travel beyond “oh, hey, here is a horsey thingy” (if at all, you don’t get horsies in the Fallouts but you do in Witcher 3. And I frequently horsied too and fro in that game, even when I could have warped). They’re busy designing and tweaking lots of other mechanics (though in Bethesda’s case, maybe I should say “designing” and “tweaking”, or possibly “just throw shit at the wall and not even bother to pay attention to see what sticks”? Eh, that’s so mean).

All of this isn’t to say that I want to super jump or repel everywhere in Fallout 4.5*. But if you can’t work awesome traversal mechanics into the game in a thematically reasonably way, or come up with something that doesn’t make me want to skip the tedium, at least give me Xenoblade Chronicle X’s super sprinting. At the very fucking least. Walking - literally walking (occasional bursts of sprinting punctuated by longer stretches of walking is actually worse) - from Sanctuary to Diamond City is pants.

Bethesda removing Flight from whichever TES game was basically when they quit trying to think about it. At least Dungeon lords made you earn it, and it was still kinda limited (lol Dungeon Lords).

  • I want to super jump everywhere, in everything, all the time. YMMV, though if it does you are a pod person.
3309

Exploration is encouraged by being able to find something interesting around every corner (though it’s usually just a randomly locked box with a spring in it, because Bethesda). Exploration is only accomplised via walking.

Once you’ve been through an area, it’s explored. Then it’s just walking. Random Encounters really aren’t all that (except thanks BOS for all the loots).

3310

While we’re on the subject of fast travel - the way Skyrim with a carriage mod did it is my preferred style. Instead of only having carriages at the major cities the mod also added them to small villages and towns. This essentially created a pretty reasonable spread of fast travel points across the map that you could utilize in a fully immersive way. You could casually travel to one of the towns for a measly fee of 100 gold, explore the surrounding area and then travel to the next town, or even trek on foot if you felt like it. This is how I played the game with Requiem and I enjoyed it immensely, way more than with FT enabled like in vanilla.

I haven’t played Morrowind but what malkav wrote a couple posts up also sounds like a well thought out FT system.

edit: I can totally see myself using a mod for FO4 with a caravan system that would accomplish the same as the carriage mod in Skyrim.

3311

The mods that remove fast travel weren’t very popular because Bethesda has designed everything about their recent games assuming you can and will just fast travel everywhere you’ve been. There are places where mods can shore up some weakness of design, but it’s a pretty tall ask for them to fundamentally alter the core design. It is perfectly possible to design a large open world with limited (or even no) fast travel - you just need to account for it when you position things and design travel mechanics.

3312

One complicating factor I think for Fallout is that the world is supposed to be really, really scary and dangerous out there. Not that Skyrim or Morrowind, say, were paradises, but the post-apocalyptic wastelands are seriously dangerous places. Fast travel is weird for me mostly because it completely removes a major aspect of the world, the danger of traveling “on the surface,” from the perspective of a vault dweller for instance.

I mean, you have every third person it seems being a murderous raider. There are roaming feral ghouls all over. You have mutated animals that can rip your limbs clean off. You have robots that have gone bonkers, crazed fanatics with power armor, murderous synths, and trigger-happy caravan guards. You have radiation all over the place, and in Fallout 4 you even have an attempt at STALKER-style radiation storms. Travel in this environment is a challenge, and some of the best parts of the game come from trying to get to your next quest location only to find you can’t get there from here, directly, so you work your way around to where you’re going, having to dodge or avoid or kill the above mentioned obstacles.

In this environment, “fast travel” is hard to reconcile, thematically or contextually. As a game mechanic catering to player tastes, it works (hell, I confess, I’m a filthy fast-travel using heathen most of the time), but it totally breaks the lore. For instance, walking from Southie to Sanctuary is not a trek for the faint of heart. Caravans coming up from Quincy, say, take guards and are often attacked on the way. You, though, can always get home safe and sound, even loaded to the gills with more valuable stuff than any ten caravans, because you can teleport there effectively. Hmm, now that’s a late-game possibility, but no matter. The point is, I do definitely see the problem here. It makes no sense that you can safely and instantly pop back and forth from a lore standpoint. That is not to say from a game mechanics/player satisfaction point of view what they’re doing is wrong, though. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of players would balk at a more “realistic” or lore-centered travel system, and making it optional wouldn’t really be better than having a mod. From a design POV, it should be integral to the worldbuilding.

Wastelands 2, though a very different sort of game, doesn’t allow you to fast travel, though it abstracts the process because the game world is literally not a world but a collection of zones loosely linked by overland travel through, well, a wasteland. Fast travel there would not make much sense, even though you rarely come across much in the Wastelands that is interesting. In Fallout 4, there is so much stuff everywhere that you always miss out on something when you fast travel. After a while, the stuff you’re missing diminishes to mostly the radiant/random stuff, but that still argues strongly for a travel system that scales with game progression. Early on, there should be zero fast travel. You’re fresh out of a vault, you’re literally just thawed out, and you are freakin’ clueless about this not-so brave new world. As you get stronger, know more people, learn the new landscape, etc., your options should increase. Pay a caravan to join it, or serve as a guard, for instance. Eventually, your faction rewards should include various forms of fast travel, as is already done to an extent. By the time you’re pretty much just tooling around like the angel of death, sure, full fast travel would make sense. If you can one-shot alpha Deathclaws, no one is going to mess with you. But when you come out of the vault with a pistol and an ugly blue suit? Not so much.

tl;dr, for me, it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game (124 hours and counting), but I have to agree that the world design is, well, inconsistent and in some ways sloppy. I truly admire much of what is being done, and the game has an astounding amount of mostly really nice content. It’s the context, and the way it’s all woven together, that sort of falls down. Bethesda has demonstrated time and again that they can build the components of a world. What they have not mastered is weaving it all together into the world itself, and fast travel is one bit of evidence for that failing.

3313

I’m enjoying this series of perma-death diaries: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/falloutdiary/ It starts out slow but gets interesting around day 4. It touches upon fast travel and exploring.

3314

I like the way Rockstar handled the issue of traversal in GTA 5. First, they took away fast travel entirely. I know that bugs some players, but I give the developers props for committing to that decision. How they “solved” the issue of boredom, based on lessons learned from years of designing open worlds, was to sprinkle random and hidden events along the roads of the game. You can come across muggings, hitch-hikers, ambushes, armored cars, shootouts, etc. Some of those events can balloon into longer quests or have payoffs in the main quest. The player character’s dialogue in those events can differ based on which character you happen to be adding variety. Then, Rockstar made the actual travel itself - the act of driving or flying - interesting enough that you can’t just cruise on autopilot and zone out. Finally, they leveraged their technical prowess to create visually impressive landmarks and terrain to keep the player engaged. Driving from faux Hollywood to the desert and then the shore feels like an actual trip even though it only takes a couple of minutes.

Another game that I think does travel really well is Just Cause 2/3. Avalanche makes the act of travel (using the parachute, tether hook, and glider) a skillful activity. Actually moving from A to B is an engaging challenge the player sets for themselves.

Crossing back and forth over the same terrain in both of these games remains interesting for the player due to the ways the developers handled it. In contrast, traveling over the same terrain in Fallout 3/4 feels like a chore. There’s nothing engaging or interesting about the jog from Sanctuary to Diamond City once you’ve done it a couple of times and found the marked points on the map along the way. Nothing different happens if you repeat the journey other than coming across a random traveling merchant with nothing worth buying, or a random pack of molerats or raiders to shoot. Why not use fast travel? Especially if you’re constantly doing the journey just to drop garbage off at the workshop?

3315

I like the way Rockstar handled the issue of traversal in GTA 5. First, they took away fast travel entirely. I know that bugs some players, but I give the developers props for committing to that decision. How they “solved” the issue of boredom, based on lessons learned from years of designing open worlds, was to sprinkle random and hidden events along the roads of the game. You can come across muggings, hitch-hikers, ambushes, armored cars, shootouts, etc. Some of those events can balloon into longer quests or have payoffs in the main quest. The player character’s dialogue in those events can differ based on which character you happen to be adding variety.

This part of it is done in FO4 too… All kinds of random crap can happen while you are just wandering around. Not just random groups of people murdering each other either, but actual encounters with conversing NPC’s and stuff.

This actually occurred for me at one point where I was about to fail a mission to help some settlers, because I had forgotten about it and too much time passed. In those cases, sometimes fast travel is impossible, because fast traveling consumes more in-game time than traveling by foot. So it got to a point where if I had fast traveled to Sanctuary, it failed the mission before I could talk to the settler… so I set off to just run there.

Along the way, I just happened to hear some dude yelling at someone, and so I investigated it a bit. Off to the side of the road were two folks getting ready to shoot some guy. I went up and started talking to them, and it was a whole little thing.

It was pretty neat, and I totally would have missed it if I had fast traveled. And this was on a section of the map which I had traveled tons of times.

So interesting things actually DO happen out in the wilderness, even if you’ve been there before.